Sicario: Day of the Soldado director Stefano Sollima doesn't think he should make a follow-up

With solid-to-mixed reviews and a box-office debut that outperformed the first entry, Sicario: Day of the Soldado has yielded nothing but positive results for Sony, seemingly opening the door to discussions about a third installment. But according to Soldado director Stefano Sollima, that threequel would have to happen with a new director at the helm.

Speaking to Variety, Sollima — who made his English-language debut on the project, which also marked his first studio outing — opined that Sicario, which was directed by Denis Villeneuve, and Soldado are more akin to an anthology series, each movie demanding a distinct style from its director.

“Every movie in these series needs to be a standalone that stays in the same world,” Sollima told Variety. “I’d love to watch another chapter of Sicario, but it should be from a different director who has their own specific style. You shouldn’t have more than one film from the same director. Then it would be too much like a real franchise.”

Representatives for Sony did not immediately reply to EW’s request for comment.

While Soldado employs most of the same characters from Sicario, including Benicio Del Toro‘s assassin Alejandro and his special-ops handler Matt, many (including Sollima) have stressed the key differences between this film and its predecessor. Absent, for example, is Emily Blunt’s idealistic FBI agent, whom Sollima has stated he didn’t want to include due to her function in Sicario as something of a moral compass for the audience. His hope, aside from differentiating his film from Villeneuve’s, was to deny audience members that guidance, instead dropping them more unsparingly into the immoral morass of drug cartels and border politics so memorably introduced by the first film.